Web application development today is not just limited to the developing and deploying it, it requires developers to be skilled in a multitude of disciplines. Of course, developing a user-friendly web application is important to survive in today’s fiercely competitive market, but one should never ignore the importance of security when developing applications.
When it comes to the security, there are a lot of things one should think and worry about. For example, you should check whether your site is secured or protected against denial of service attacks or not. Is it possible for a user to corrupt your database with fake data? Do you think it would be easy for the users to get unauthorized access within a restricted area of your website?
Are you approaching for a web application development and don’t know what are the security concerns you should keep in mind to make your website safe?? Here’re a few things that you should keep in mind.
• XSS (Cross Site Scripting)
Cross-site scripting is nothing but an attack in which a user is tricked or trapped into executing code from an attacker’s site in the context of your website. This is a problem regardless of what your website does, but the severity of the problem may change based on the user can do with over the website. However, you can leverage from a wide range of filters offered by the programming languages in order to get rid of XSS.
In such scenario, if a site is open to XSS attacks, then chances are higher that the users’ data is at high risk. Therefore, one should try to understand it and incorporate desired filters to reduce the risk of such XSS attacks.
• CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery)
It is another kind of attack where a malicious site tricks your potential visitors into carrying out an action on our site. It generally happens when a visitor or a user log in into a website that he or she uses a lot, and then visit a malicious site immediately without logging out. It you site suffers from a CSRF attack, the malicious site can do a lot of things on the behalf of the user.
You can use nonce in order to help users overcome such tricks from the evil sites. However, there is no guarantee that using nonce would help you get 100% protection against CSRF, but one should surely incorporate it to protect their web application development venture.
• Click Jacking
Click-jacking came in the limelight recently due to attacks on the popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which spread rapidly due to the social nature of both of these platforms. Of course, using nonce would help you protect your website from CSRF, but what if the user is tricked into clicking the submit link themselves? Well, you can use Frame busting in order to overcome this issue, but it is not foolproof.
However, you can also disable the submit button by default and use JavaScript to enable it once you’ve determined that it is safe to use.
Apart from all these, you should also consider Phishing, Shell injections and SQL injections whenever going for web application development to make it secure for the end users. Have you ever faced any of these issues? Share your views in the comments..!
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